From Word to Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning

Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency, which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses (in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to different domains and compositionality.Comment: 46 pages, 8 figures. Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Researc

Embedding Based Link Prediction for Knowledge Graph Completion

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are the most widely used representation of structured information about a particular domain consisting of billions of facts in the form of entities (nodes) and relations (edges) between them. Besides, the KGs also encapsulate the semantic type information of the entities. The last two decades have witnessed a constant growth of KGs in various domains such as government, scholarly data, biomedical domains, etc. KGs have been used in Machine Learning based applications such as entity linking, question answering, recommender systems, etc. Open KGs are mostly heuristically created, automatically generated from heterogeneous resources such as text, images, etc., or are human-curated. However, these KGs are often incomplete, i.e., there are missing links between the entities and missing links between the entities and their corresponding entity types. This thesis focuses on addressing these two challenges of link prediction for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC): \textbf{(i)} General Link Prediction in KGs that include head and tail prediction, triple classification, and \textbf{(ii)} Entity Type Prediction. Most of the graph mining algorithms are proven to be of high complexity, deterring their usage in KG-based applications. In recent years, KG embeddings have been trained to represent the entities and relations in the KG in a low-dimensional vector space preserving the graph structure. In most published works such as the translational models, convolutional models, semantic matching, etc., the triple information is used to generate the latent representation of the entities and relations. In this dissertation, it is argued that contextual information about the entities obtained from the random walks, and textual entity descriptions, are the keys to improving the latent representation of the entities for KGC. The experimental results show that the knowledge obtained from the context of the entities supports the hypothesis. Several methods have been proposed for KGC and their effectiveness is shown empirically in this thesis. Firstly, a novel multi-hop attentive KG embedding model MADLINK is proposed for Link Prediction. It considers the contextual information of the entities by using random walks as well as textual entity descriptions of the entities. Secondly, a novel architecture exploiting the information contained in a pre-trained contextual Neural Language Model (NLM) is proposed for Triple Classification. Thirdly, the limitations of the current state-of-the-art (SoTA) entity type prediction models have been analysed and a novel entity typing model CAT2Type is proposed that exploits the Wikipedia Categories which is one of the most under-treated features of the KGs. This model can also be used to predict missing types of unseen entities i.e., the newly added entities in the KG. Finally, another novel architecture GRAND is proposed to predict the missing entity types in KGs using multi-label, multi-class, and hierarchical classification by leveraging different strategic graph walks in the KGs. The extensive experiments and ablation studies show that all the proposed models outperform the current SoTA models and set new baselines for KGC. The proposed models establish that the NLMs and the contextual information of the entities in the KGs together with the different neural network architectures benefit KGC. The promising results and observations open up interesting scopes for future research involving exploiting the proposed models in domain-specific KGs such as scholarly data, biomedical data, etc. Furthermore, the link prediction model can be exploited as a base model for the entity alignment task as it considers the neighbourhood information of the entities